Ally Cook survived the worst school shooting in American history. Now she and her parents share the inspiring story of how the family is healing — and Ally is rebuilding her life.

Allison Cook got a tattoo a few days before she went back to school for her junior year this fall, but her parents held their disapproval in check. They realized that for their quiet, level­headed 20-year-old, the Virginia Tech logo and coral lily were a way to mourn, to remember — and to move on.

Ally had the images tattooed on her left side. On the right are scars that stand for a tragedy: the day a gunman systematically pumped bullets into Allison Cook during the most deadly shooting spree in U.S. history. Thirty-two people were killed at Virginia Tech that day and at least 17 more, including Ally, were wounded in the terrifying rampage on the idyllic campus in Blacksburg, VA.

Two of the bullets, one of which came within a hairbreadth of taking Allison's life, are still lodged in her body. And while her tattoo is meant to counter her scars, as a mark "that wasn't inflicted on me," Ally and her close-knit family have come to realize that survival brings its own complications. Suddenly, "normal" became just a memory, familiar but unfindable, a homeland inexplicably moved to another continent.

Even for survivors and their families, coping with the aftermath of violence is often a slow, imperfect process. "Incorporating this event into our lives, weaving it into who we are while not letting it define who we are, will continue for a very, very long time," says Lynn Cook, Ally's mother. Early last year, her three children — Ally; her twin sister, Hilary; and their older brother, Matthew, 24 — had all left their home in Richmond, VA, and been well on their way to establishing lives of their own. Then the unthinkable happened.

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The Phone Call

On the chilly Monday morning of April 16, 2007, Seung Hui Cho, a 23-year-old senior with a history of mental illness, killed two students inside a Tech dorm around 7:15, then appeared about two hours later at Norris Hall, where he chained the three main entrances shut before heading to the second floor. There, he zigzagged among four classrooms, wordlessly massacring terrified teachers and students before taking his own life as police closed in. Ally and 18 others were in Room 211, the French classroom from which only one student emerged unharmed.

Setting off from work for a meeting that morning, Lynn had no idea of the horrors unfolding on her daughter's campus about three hours away. Then the office called on her cell phone, telling her to contact Allison right away. She immediately dialed Ally's cell, only to hear a stranger answer. The woman identified herself as an emergency room nurse at Montgomery Regional Hospital, and without giving any details said she was with Ally in the ER. She told Lynn that her daughter was going to be OK, then held the phone for Ally, who was lying on a backboard. "Mom," Lynn heard her say. "I've been shot."

Continue reading Ally's moving story on the next page.

"Ally, we're on our way," Lynn told her. "We love you; we'll be there." She spoke briefly to the emergency room doctor, who said that Ally had been shot through the chest. "He said that she was a very lucky girl, given what was happening," Lynn recalls. "At the time it made no sense to me; I had no frame of reference yet." None of the Cooks, including Allison, had been told the extent of the tragedy, but Lynn wasn't looking for background information. All she could think of was how to gather her family for support and get to her wounded daughter.

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As she sped to her house, Lynn made a flurry of phone calls, the first to her husband, Paul, who works from home, letting him know that she was coming to pick him up so they could continue to Virginia Tech. Paul, who had just turned on the TV before getting Lynn's call, was incredulous at what had happened, then furious. Next, Lynn phoned her other children, Hilary and Matthew. Then Matt's fiancée called and offered to drive from her home in Richmond to pick up Hilary at James Madison University in Harrisonburg and bring her to the hospital, too. Arriving home, Lynn paused only to collect her husband — "We have to go now" is all she said — and they immediately took off in the car for Blacksburg.

As Lynn drove, the couple kept making calls. They had friends and colleagues who worked at Montgomery Regional, so they were able to get updates on Ally's condition as she was taken into the operating room to get a chest tube to help her breathe after one of her lungs collapsed. Still unaware of the scope of the tragedy, Lynn phoned one of Allison's roommates and asked her to go wait with Ally until the Cooks could get there. Lynn didn't know, and the roommate didn't tell her until much later, that at that moment, school authorities were still unsure of the killer's location or whether he had acted alone. So to do as Lynn asked, Ally's friend had to slip out of a lecture hall that was effectively in lockdown and race off campus, where friends met her with a car to take her to the hospital.

About an hour into the drive, the Cooks switched on the radio and started hearing "horrendous, horrific projections of the number of people who'd been killed," Lynn recalls. "I looked at Paul and said, 'That has to be incorrect.' We still had no idea of the magnitude." Lynn can't remember how she got to Ally. One moment she was running across the parking lot, she says, and the next she was upstairs in the intensive care unit. As the rest of the family gathered for a vigil (they were told it would take 24 to 36 hours for doctors to ascertain how much internal bleeding Ally had suffered), Lynn asked the doctors questions that one of her sisters, a physician, phoned in before leaving for the hospital herself. The three bullets were located in three spots: Ally's lower back; upper back; and below her collarbone. The doctors felt that it was best not to disturb them (although about a week later, a follow-up exam would result in the lower bullet being removed from Ally's back). It wasn't until after Lynn's sister arrived and they reviewed Ally's CT scan together that Lynn realized one of the bullets had been on a direct trajectory for Ally's heart, deflected only when it hit a rib.

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Although dazed with disbelief, Ally was conscious and lucid in the intensive care unit. With surprising matter-of-factness, she recounted for the police how she and her fellow French students heard shots nearby and were huddling in the back of the room when Cho burst in, sprayed the room with gunfire, then left — only to return minutes later. Ally had been unscathed in the first round, then shot in the second.

Athletic and fit, she was already walking two days later, and the hospital let her twin, Hilary, stay with her that night. The Cooks were grateful for Ally's swift physical recovery, but it meant that there was little they could do for her beyond being there. Hilary hovered over her sister, asking questions. Was Allison thirsty? Did she need more water? Could Hilary get her some fresh water? But at some point during all the waiting, all the tumult, and all the developing bad news, Ally Cook made a decision. In the fall, she told her parents, she would go back to Virginia Tech.

Read about Ally's homecoming and how the Cook family learned to heal on the next page.

The Homecoming

Allison was released from the hospital on Thursday evening, and county officials sent a squad to fetch her home in the relative comfort of an ambulance, while her family accompanied her in their cars. They arrived to find that Matt and his fiancée had lit the lamps, opened the doors, and filled the house with flowers to welcome them home.

The irony was that, in spite of her ordeal, Allison required no special follow-up care. They had to check her wounds for signs of infection, and she had to strengthen her weakened lung with breathing exercises, but otherwise she was fine, and her parents could try to resume the routine rhythms of normal life. Though each family member would experience different emotions at different times — an unsynchronized dance of anger, grief, sorrow, and even guilt — from the outset they shared a single goal: They would not let this horror determine who they were. Or as Allison told her parents, "I don't want to be known as the girl who got shot."

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Her first evening home, she set up camp in the family room, on the deep, rust-colored sectional in front of the fireplace. As she recalls, "My family didn't know how to act around me. They didn't ask very many questions. They all had that concerned, worried look." Indeed, figuring out how to be around the daughter they had nearly lost was something that preoccupied Paul and Lynn in those first days. Although they wanted Ally to be able to turn to them for help and support, Paul pointed out that baring their own raw emotions would only make her shut down for fear of causing them more anguish. So they tried to watch their daughter closely and follow her cues.

For her part, Ally made it clear that she didn't want anyone walking on eggshells around her. The first weekend she was home, only days after the shooting, the family chose to hold an open house for concerned friends. A few asked questions about Ally's injuries, and she answered, although mostly in general terms.

Ally's reticence about the shooting itself made Lynn believe at first that her daughter was too traumatized to talk about what happened or perhaps didn't remember the precise details. But Allison recalls every moment, down to the smell of the classroom and the vibration of Cho's footsteps as he came closer to the spot where she cowered on the floor, surrounded by the injured and the dead, "just waiting for it to be my turn." She remembers having to step around the bodies of her French professor and 11 classmates to get out of the room when the police arrived. And she remembers pointing to a 13th body, which she had walked past, that of a young man in heavy boots with two guns beside him, and telling the officers, "I think that's him."

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But Ally felt too protective of her parents to subject them to those details. "I had been through a horrible event," she explains, "and I didn't want anyone else to have those images in their mind, too."

Nonetheless, her mother wanted to know — needed to know — everything. Although she didn't want to force Allison to relive the event, as an analytical person Lynn was driven to collect every possible detail about the tragedy. She pored over media reports, spoke with the parents of other survivors, and even asked police if she could listen to the whispered call between an emergency dispatcher and Emily Haas, a fellow victim who was also Ally's sorority sister.

Continue reading the Cook family's story on the next page.

Lynn's request was denied, but later reports eventually related what had happened: The call had been received by the Blacksburg police at 9:41 a.m., and was transferred to the Virginia Tech police at 9:42. They reached the second floor of Norris Hall at 9:51, and the line stayed open throughout. Allison had heard Emily whisper to the dispatcher that she was afraid to speak, had heard the dispatcher tell Emily to keep breathing, help was on the way. As they waited, minute by long minute, Ally had kept her eyes squeezed shut and used her arm to shield her head, lying on her left side in hopes of protecting her heart, until she felt first one bullet and then another slam through the heavy winter jacket she was wearing. Much later, when she got the coat back, Ally was surprised to find it soaked in blood, which, she realized, "may not all have been mine."

As Lynn amassed the knowledge she needed, there was one story line she never sought: the killer's history and what may have driven him to mass murder. The Cooks say that at the time they didn't ponder his motives; even now, they rarely utter his name, choosing to refer to him by pronoun. "He didn't interest me at all," Paul says. "It was more the incident itself — how many shots, how long did it last. Why I need to know, I don't know." But Lynn thinks she does: "I need to understand everything Ally went through. It's the only way I can share her burden." As Ally sees it, "My parents needed to know for their own healing."

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The Monday after Ally's return home, just one week since the shooting, the everyday world reemerged with a bang as contractors arrived to start remodeling the Cooks' kitchen. Lynn had wanted to call them off, worrying that all the chaos and specifically the noise from the nail guns might upset Ally, but Paul insisted that the family go forward. "We've got to get back to normal," Lynn remembers him saying, and the contractors were just the beginning. Hilary was scheduled to go to school in Italy that summer; Matt was supposed to get married in a few months. Hitting the pause button was tempting but hardly practical. Still, when the contractors showed up, Lynn recalls, "I went out the back door, crying, as they came through the front. I thought, I can't deal with this.

"But Paul was right," Lynn says now, and admitting the workers into their home showed the family how deeply even strangers felt for the victims of the tragedy. Aware of the delicate situation, the contractors became caregivers, fielding media calls, answering the front door, accepting flowers and UPS packages, asking Allison how she was doing when she ventured downstairs from her parents' bedroom, where Paul set her up during the day with headphones, her laptop and TV, and stacks of DVDs, including all of her favorite Friends episodes. Before they left, the work crew made a donation to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund established for the massacre's victims and gave the Cooks a gift card for dinner at a nearby restaurant.

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Meanwhile, Ally was working hard to get back to normal. She had decided not to finish out the school year, but to accept the grades she had earned so far that semester. Always outdoorsy, she started going for walks in the neighborhood the day after she got home, and was soon pushing her doctors to let her perform strenuous lifeguard-certification exercises, so she could resume her usual summer job at the community pool come Memorial Day.

Emotionally, she seemed to be rebounding equally well, leaning on a support network of friends, family, and a counselor she saw sporadically throughout the summer. But one thing she had to negotiate was dealing with other people's responses to what the Cooks neutrally term "the event" or "the incident." It was disconcerting, she says, when her parents "kept telling me how proud they were of my bravery. A lot of people told me I was their hero. Why me? I felt like I didn't do anything. That first week, I felt guilty for the victims, for their families."

Although grateful that their daughter had been spared, and grieving for the families who had been less fortunate, the Cooks, too, felt emotional ripple effects as they tried to resume their lives. Hilary and Ally used to text-message each other at their separate schools every morning, but somehow hadn't on the day of the tragedy. Unaware of the shooting, Hilary had just been waiting for class to begin when she got Lynn's call. Back in school again now, she feels the urge to check her cell phone compulsively, to make sure there's no word of an emergency. She also still mirrors one of Allison's post-trauma rituals: Upon entering an unfamiliar room, each twin immediately scans her surroundings to see where the nearest exit is.

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By May, Ally was preparing for her job at the pool, and even starting a new romance with a friend of a childhood pal. But as Hilary's long-planned summer trip to Florence approached, she felt hesitant. She was supposed to leave one month to the day after the Tech shootings, and a week before her flight, she admitted over morning coffee with Allison and Lynn that she was thinking about not going. Allison wouldn't hear of it. "What're you going to do, sit around and look at me all summer?" she demanded. It was her sister's signature sarcasm that reassured Hilary: If Allison was getting snarky, maybe normal wasn't so far away after all.

Read about Ally's brave return to Virginia Tech on the next page.

The Return to Tech

In June, the Cooks' healing process reached a turning point. The school announced that it was reopening Norris Hall and offered the families affected by the massacre a chance to see for themselves where the tragedy had happened. For Allison, who had already been back to Blacksburg for a doctor's appointment, and to collect her belongings from the off-campus apartment she'd shared, the offer held no interest. Lynn pushed, suggesting it would remove the mystery from the building. Ally's retort was swift: "There is no mystery, Mom. I know exactly what happened there."

"I used the wrong word," Lynn admits. But perhaps the exchange helped Allison realize how much her parents needed to see the scene for themselves; in the end she relented, and led her parents and brother on the tour. Tech sent along a counselor, a school liaison, and a policeman, the latter providing a running commentary of the gunman's movements that day, pausing intermittently to make sure Allison was OK.

Then it was time to enter Room 211. Lynn remembers her daughter pointing — this is where the teacher stood, this is where my desk was, this is where I was when he shot me.... Suddenly Ally began sobbing. It was the hardest her parents had seen her cry since the attack. "I can't stay in here anymore," she wept.

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"I don't think Ally realized how hard that visit would be for her," Lynn says now. "She wasn't having a lot of trepidation about returning to school until the date started getting closer. But she is very determined. And she is not willing to give in to what happened."

If the visit brought home to Ally how painful it would be to come back to school that fall, it did nothing to weaken her resolve. She had already weighed the possibility of taking off for a semester, and had discussed her options with a counselor. But her desire to return to Tech, to reclaim the life she loved there — her friends, her sorority, her challenging studies, similar to a premed program — prevailed, and she signed up for a full, even strenuous, course load. "She loved Virginia Tech; she still does. She can't see herself going anywhere else," says Lynn. And Ally seemed to realize that if she couldn't find normal in Blacksburg, she might not find it elsewhere, either. She told her mother, "A classroom is a classroom. What would make it different somewhere else?"

Allison continues to grieve for the students and faculty members who lost their lives that day. She also chastises herself for any fleeting sense of invincibility, feeling it's "selfish" to think that having survived once, she is somehow safe. "Counselors all told me I was here for a purpose. Sometimes it's hard to hear that, because I feel pressure to do something great with my life," Ally says. "What if I don't live up to expectations?" She is determined to focus, instead, on letting go, on living life as it unfolds. "If I have a purpose," she reasons, "it'll find me or I'll find it."

As the day of departure grew closer, Lynn found it unbearably painful to think about her daughter returning to the place where she had almost died. The weekend before classes were due to begin, the family made one more pilgrimage: They drove to Tech for the school's mass memorial service, the whole family in tears as they watched thousands of students, clad in Hokie orange and maroon, swarm across the Drillfield, where 32 stones were placed in memory of those who lost their lives.

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With Allison's permission, Paul and Lynn contacted each of her professors, asking to meet with them as classes began so they could talk about their daughter, about how to see through her reserve and watch for signs that she was struggling. "You have to know her to realize when she's agitated," her mother explains. "The way she'll start tapping her fingers or just turning her head the other way."

Together, they toured her classrooms that same weekend. Allison's first class would be French, she had learned, and although it was a different classroom, in a different building, visiting the small space instantly brought on a wave of anxiety. The layout was too similar to that of the other French classroom — the location of the door, the blackboard. Paul and Lynn let Ally's French professor know, and she discreetly arranged to move the class.

On her first day back, Ally reported to her mother by phone that, even though the opening session of French had been held in that classroom, she'd managed to stick it out. "She wouldn't call it this," Lynn says, "but I think going back is a triumph for her."

Legal repercussions from the Tech shootings are likely to take years to settle, but the Cooks are committed to moving on with their lives. Some $7.5 million in donations — from children's allowance money to the New York Yankees' gift of $1 million — poured into the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund, and Ally was entitled to a share. Under the proposed disbursement, she qualified for a lump sum of $40,000 and free tuition at Tech until she graduates. The family chose to accept the offer. "We're not searching for answers, because there are none," Lynn says. "A lot of things happen to a lot of families. We don't want to be defined by this."

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For now, Lynn tallies Allison's good days on campus and the not-so-good. "Ally works hard every day, and her improvement has been exponential," her mother says, "but the first two weeks back at school were very difficult." Ally came home with strep throat after just three days, and barely made it through her brother's wedding that weekend.

Tired, ill, and apprehensive as she faced returning that Monday, Allison wondered whether she was trying too hard, too soon. Lynn pointed out that she was carrying 18 credits, with several tough classes. Talking it through, Ally decided to try dropping a course. Lynn offered to drive her to school, if that would make things easier. "No," Ally replied, "I have to do this myself."

Earlier that evening, as Ally had slept, exhausted, on the sofa, the time had come for first her sister and then her brother to head back to their own homes and lives. Before they left, each came and held their sister close as she slumbered. When Ally finally woke, Lynn asked whether she remembered her siblings' embraces, but she had been sleeping too soundly. "They were there," Lynn told her, and her voice grows softer now, explaining the moment's importance for her. "They are always there for Ally. Even when she isn't aware of it, we are always there."

The road back to normal is long, but for Ally, it seems the destination is in sight. The day of the shooting, she'd been dreading a speech she was supposed to deliver in her public-speaking class that afternoon. As a survivor, she went back to her old Catholic school to address the graduating eighth graders. Standing before an auditorium of schoolchildren, she found her voice: Life is too short, she said that day, too precious. "I told them not to be afraid of anything."

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